Back when the documentary Killer Legends was broadcast on the Chiller channel, I wrote a blog post explaining a dispute I had with the filmmaker and explaining that I found his presentation to be a bit simplistic and superficial. The movie explored recent crimes that the filmmaker tied to famous urban legends, particularly those of the “Hook Man” and Killer Clowns. In writing about why I didn’t feel that the urban legends had an immediate origin in recent crimes, I wrote that “I don’t believe that most urban legends emerge from specific incidents from the recent past; if they did so, they wouldn’t be folklore and could easily have been verified by the original tellers of the stories.” I therefore presented some precedents for the urban legends in the myths and folklore of the nineteenth century.

Music expert and folklorist Steven D. Winick takes me to task for this in the Huffington Post over this point but much more elaborately on Killer Clowns, and in great detail. (He also posted a comment on my blog post directing me and my readers to the DVD release.) Winick holds a PhD in folklore and folklife from the University of Pennsylvania. Winick ignores the context of my blog post and instead takes my exploration of potential avenues of research that Chiller downplayed or ignored in their press release for a definitive academic treatise. Winick uses his blog post to promote the DVD release of the film and attack me for discussing material related to its claims, but as he briefly notes he’s in the movie and consulted with the producers on “angles to explore in the film.” No wonder he’s so anxious to note where I disagree with him! Specifically, he takes issue with my claim that there were stories of killer clowns in existence prior to John Wayne Gacy and therefore Gacy is unlikely to have been the sole origin point for Chicago’s spate of “clown abductions” in the early 1990s, which I took pains to note were closely correlated with the release of fictional killer clown stories like It (book 1986; miniseries 1990) and Killer Klowns from Outer Space (1988). Winick, however, misses the fact that I was responding specifically to the filmmaker’s Twitter discussion with me over Chiller’s press release about his film and that I had not actually seen the film, which I wasn’t able to get a copy of. Therefore, he criticizes me for not knowing that the film mentions the Joker and other early killer clowns. Obviously, I can’t know what I didn’t see. I specifically addressed this in my blog post: “I also, not unreasonably, assumed that the network’s press release was correct in saying that the film sought out ‘the true crimes that may have spawned these urban legends.’ If that wasn’t the case, that’s on the network for false advertising.” Anyway, here is some of what Winick dislikes:

Colavito's post is admirably detailed, but suffers from a form of overreach typical of 19th-century folklore scholarship: stories with any plot point or character name in common are "tied together with a bow," to use Colavito's words, but significant connections fail to emerge. For example, he suggests that the Hookman is somehow connected to killer clowns, because he distantly resembles characters in several 19th-century poems, one of whom has a name etymologically related to "harlequin." The connection frankly seems forced, and he doesn't explain its supposed significance. I don't want to suggest that Colavito is entirely wrong; his analysis complements the film with more possible interpretations, and readers can decide for themselves which parallels are farfetched. But he doesn't provide any convincing reason that the legends can't be inspired by true crimes.

Winick mistook my literary flourish at the end of my original blog post, when I showed that the Erl-King legends (genuine European folklore!) that parallel Hook Man stories in their function of terrorizing young lovers also spawned the Harlequin character which formed the template for the “killer clown” plays of the nineteenth century. I did not claim they were the same figure, only that like Zeus and Dyaus, they share a common origin, however much they have diverged over the centuries. There is no reason a legend can’t be inspired by true crimes; however, there is every reason that the specific legends in the film were unlikely to have been solely, entirely, or (in many cases) directly inspired by the specific true crimes explored in the film. Was John Wayne Gacy on the mind of Chicago teens in the early 1990s? His crimes would have been more than ten years in the past with no recorded killer clown urban legends in between, while It (1986; film version 1990) was much more recent; the local clown was even known as “Homey the Clown” after the In Living Color character and was said by local kids to be dressed as Homey, not Gacy . Worse, the folklore figure shares almost nothing in common with Gacy: Gacy did not kidnap children, drive a white van, or murder anyone while dressed as a clown. Unlike movie clowns, he also didn’t chase people with big knives while dressed as a clown. These are all imports from pop culture, not true crime. It’s true that there is no widespread recorded fear of clowns before Gacy, but there wasn’t one immediately after him either. It didn’t emerge for another decade, until It, Killer Klowns, Jack Nicholson’s turn as the Joker in Tim Burton’s Batman (1989) and the evil clown movie genre of the 1980s: Blood Harvest, Clownhouse, Out of the Dark, etc. This doesn’t even count the evil clowns that predate Gacy, such as the killer clown from a 1969 episode of Scooby Doo and the bluntly named 1976 movie The Clown Murders, starring John Candy. As I had hoped to make clear in my first blog post, the modern “Killer Clown” is an amalgam of many influences: from Gacy perhaps, but more from these pop culture sources, as well as the generalized fear of urban violence c. 1990 and a desire to find a new take on the 1980s slasher genre. Because it can be shown that killer clowns of various stripes predate Gacy—going all the way back to nineteenth century stage plays—to put everything down to Gacy just doesn’t hold water. That was my point, and I would also be willing to bet that many of the early killer clowns grow out of the stage tradition of violent clowns like Pagliacci (1892), whose distinctive costume was reproduced on Scooby Doo, in the Batman TV series, and in many other killer clown movies, betraying the filmmakers’ familiarity with the homicidal character. The contrast between the clown as figure of fun and the tragedy of a clown committing murder surely left a strong impression. Similarly, Winick takes me to task for connecting Pagliacci to the Commedia dell’Arte figure Pierrot when the clown of Pagliacci was modelled on a (non-clown) actor from real life, therefore, he says, showing the true-crime origins of even this fictional clown crime. Winick misread my post there: I connected the costume to that of Pierrot, and that distinctive costume was adopted because it reflected the earlier vaguely sinister chaos figure of Peirrot, thus foreshadowing the violence to come in the later opera. It’s the same reason Batman put Cesar Romero’s Joker in a Pagliacci costume in its first episode: It implies an evil to come. That isn’t a folklore assertion but rather a fairly obvious conclusion from the internal evidence of the source texts—which is out of the realm of folklore and entering the realm of textual criticism, artistic choices distinct from urban legends.

Colavito's biggest mistake is saying that stories inspired by recent events "wouldn't be folklore;" folklore arises from and comments on current events, and such relatively recent events as 9/11 and Hurricane Katrina have given rise to many legends.

I will admit that the line quoted above was a bit unclear; I did not mean to imply that folklore cannot have a basis in real life, only that the stories presented in the film could not have begun as professed relations of news accounts in the immediate aftermath of the events, since our media-saturated culture (even in the 1990s, when Killer Clowns emerged as a legend) should have made it easy to verify whether such events occurred. This may not be the case, as Winick notes above, but I find it hard to believe that someone could read about John Wayne Gacy and turn that into an almost completely unrelated story of a kidnapping clown in a white truck. It’s true that real life events like 9/11 and Katrina inspire urban legends. But they’re legends of 9/11 and Katrina, not legends of a vague time and place where somebody heard that something bad happened to some building somewhere and maybe somebody got hurt. Hook Man, for example, lacks this specificity; he is not a mythologized real life event but a mythic figure localized. The Killer Clown is similarly a mythic figure imposed on local conditions in violent, impoverished neighborhoods in Chicago. Winick doesn’t say anything else about the Hook Man, except to complain, as I noted above, that I say he is “somehow connected to killer clowns, because he distantly resembles characters in several 19th-century poems, one of whom has a name etymologically related to ‘harlequin.’” How one can be a folklorist and not be familiar with the Erl-King, the wicked forest goblin or fairy who himself or through his daughter terrorizes and kills young lovers, is beyond me, especially since Winick participates in a May Day Faerie Festival! My point there, again, was that the idea of a supernatural figure who terrorizes and kills young lovers is very old, regardless of its local expression in rural America in the 1960s. I find it funny that Winick is happy to talk about how traditional material was reused in ballads associated with Jesse James and others but feigns shock at the idea that Hook Man might have older material folded into his legend. I thought it was amusing that the Erl-King and Pierrot, early parallels for our modern urban legends, share a mythic origin. It says nothing about how the two figures are used in urban legends today—no more so than the Indo-European *Dyeus governs how Jupiter and Tyr later developed—but makes an interesting point about how stories get started, diverge, and combine and recombine elements over time. I’d have thought a folklorist might have found that interesting.

The Killer clown archetype is itself divided into many sub archetypes. Some are just a perverted child predator. But what makes The Joker and Kefka special is they literally serve avatars of Chaotic Evil.

It can sometimes take as much as a Decade for fiction inspired by a real event to pop up.

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An Over-Educated Grunt

7/9/2014 02:14:53 am

Without going into the folklore ancestry of the Joker (see: Loki, Coyote, Raven...) the Law-Chaos/Good-Evil matrix is one of Gygax's most egregious sins against complicated storytelling.

More germane to the original blog post, though, I suspect the "evil clown" archetype is far older than credited. To use the Loki example again, Loki's role varies considerably story by story, and it's only with Christian influences that the Trickster aspect is suppressed or turned into the Deceiver, and he becomes the outright enemy of the Æsir. Even before that, though, he's not a reliable figure, and his association with fire is an apt one: he's useful, but never to be trusted, and his potential danger should always be remembered. Similar prejudices surround European gypsies, they're welcome, or at least tolerated, as entertainers, but they're never to be trusted, and the stories of them stealing babies and valuables persist to this day.

The Dungeons and Dragons alignment matrix is only a helpful fist phase. No one who references it is nesceirlly saying everyone fits into 9 simple categories. Reading what I say on Sexuality should demonstrate I don't use boxes so simplistically.

Victor Hugo's Man Who Laughs is also sadly overlooked in this exchange between Jason and the makers of this film.

I'm also inclined to see aspects of Dionysus/Bacchus in the Chaotic Monster Clown archetype. He came to be very affiliated with the Stage. but another thing is that he's the Greek God who sort of represent UnGreekness, which to the Classical educated Greeks, meany being Uncivilized. He also often associated with madness.

There are plenty of figures I didn't mention. The "Man Who Laughs" also connects to the Joker, whose iconography came from the 1928 film adaptation of the Hugo novel.

Only Me

7/9/2014 02:05:39 am

If you get the chance, will you watch the film? Or has Winick spoiled that?

I agree that a folklorist should know that stories come from somewhere and often combine elements from other stories, making each retelling different from the original source. Perhaps his appearance in the film colored his critique of your post.

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Matt Mc

7/9/2014 02:28:27 am

I plan on watching this tonight or tomorrow. I mostly enjoyed CROPSY so I have a feeling I will like this one, CROPSY also touched on the myth versus reality elements, it however overall failed for what I considered poor pacing and the over personalization of the presentation.

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spookyparadigm

7/9/2014 05:28:04 am

I read the piece after you tweeted, and I was interested in some of his critiques (some of which in turn you've addressed above to varying degrees).

But the shilling of the documentary (which he also notes he was part of at the beginning of his essay, btw) is so transparent, it really looks bad.

At the same time, if there was a film that I was professionally proud to have been a part of, and that I thought helped my discipline (say an anti-pseudoarchaeology film that wasn't, unlike a well known one, made by Biblical literalists promoting belief in a global flood and giants), I'd probably want to promote it as well. But I would try, and I hope succeed, at sounding less like a PR flack. The bulk of Winick's post does come across as a serious critique. But it is ruined, IMO, by the "This gripping and scary movie now available on DVD and Blu-ray!" pitching at the bookends.

That's my fault; HuffPo is so loaded with ads that it looks like crap on my tablet and I totally missed the first paragraph because it went off to the side of the picture. I fixed the reference above. Thanks for pointing that out.

Winick is obviously a very serious scholar who has some interesting ideas, but I agree that the way he went about presenting them made it sound like he was trying to defend the movie rather than explore the origins of Killer Clowns.

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spookyparadigm

7/10/2014 05:09:20 am

I wasn't expecting a serious scholar when I read the article, and was surprised when looking him up. And as I said, I found some of his critiques interesting (I remembered the piece, and some of them had occurred to me, but I didn't go any further with it).

To be honest, I'm kind of glad he wrote that. I'm not sure I'd notice if I wrote something that defensive, and that much like a PR shill piece (again, at the beginning and end, the middle is quite different). It's a cautionary example of something to not do.

EP

7/9/2014 05:29:45 am

"I find it hard to believe that someone could read about John Wayne Gacy and turn that into an almost completely unrelated story of a kidnapping clown in a white truck."

Jason, I agree that it's unbelievable that someone would *misunderstand* a report like that. However, a person's fantasy could be so stricken by learning about the Gacy killer that they'd become more likely to see killer clown involvement in other events around them, or even to acquire false memories of specific killer clown crimes having occurred in the past.

"the stories presented in the film could not have begun as professed relations of news accounts in the immediate aftermath of the events, since our media-saturated culture (even in the 1990s, when Killer Clowns emerged as a legend) should have made it easy to verify whether such events occurred."

I'm not quite sure I get what you're saying. Just because something is easy to check, doesn't mean people can be expected to bother to check it. It's easy enough to check many of the things you write about on this blog, yet all to many people persist in believing the most outrageous falsehoods.

The point I was trying to make, though not well, is that the kinds of urban legends under discussion here (which are only a subset of all urban legends) purport to be "true" crimes that happened to known people in known locations (though these change with the telling). If they really were inspired by real life events, these events should be much easier to find than they are. In theory, such gruesome events should have been better-known and easily discoverable in news archives. But they aren't, almost certainly because the stories are fictional and merely given the color of fact.

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Shane Sullivan

7/9/2014 07:37:08 am

Kind of sounds like you and Winick are talking past one another. I recall that your post about Killer Legends was predicated on the fact that, if the film's conclusion was that the killer clown legend was based on John Wayne Gacy, then it was wrong, and you were right about that. Relying on the press release as you were, you had no way of knowing that the film apparently didn't reach that conclusion, and did delve deeper into the history of killer clown stories.

Winick, on the other hand, points out that urban legends are sometimes inspired or influenced by actual events, and he's right about that--but you never said otherwise. He seems to have read "I don’t believe that most urban legends emerge from specific incidents from the recent past" as "no urban legend has ever had the remotest basis in fact".

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EP

7/9/2014 08:34:58 am

To say nothing of the fact that Jason uses "most" to qualify his statement, which Winick's response seems to ignore. Though this could just be a matter of degree of rigor. After all, Winick's own claim that folklore "comments" on current events could also use such qualification, since while it is true often enough there is no reason to think that it's an essential function of all folklore.

Ironically, Winick reveals that he may himself be suffering from "a form of overreach typical of 19th-century folklore scholarship" - unqualified theoretical generalizations! :)

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.

7/9/2014 10:48:02 am

in the 1800s Opera was thought revolutionary + iconic.
it defined several social memes, it could buttress the
power structure or defy it. i feel that Jason tends to be
content with precise definitions + often does not make
fanciful intuitive leaps. the reviewer is too 20th Century.

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Only Me

7/9/2014 11:16:10 am

Not necessarily. He's including more modern references to compare with well-established stories that are the staple of folklore, perhaps showing how such stories CAN arise from real events and gradually morph into something more akin to campfire ghost tales...though decidedly more insidious.

I see the killer clown outbreak in Chicago as that era's version of the Hook Man from the 40s and 50s. Sort of like Freddy Krueger being a reimagining of the Boogeyman, or icons of the slasher genre being the stalker you can't escape.

For a long time the difference between Urban Legends and Folklore was fairly simple. Folklore is what the adults talked about, while Urban Legends were what the older kids used to scare the younger kids.
Growing up in the 1950's & 60's, I remember hearing stories like the Hook, or the scratching at the door. These were usually told at campfires or at Halloween parties. They were often cautionary tales related by young people with little or no experience of real life. They were intended to be just real enough to scare others.
Another form of Urban Legend was the inter-office memo in the pre-internet days. These were, originally mimeograph (anybody remember mimeograph, what a pain those were) flyers, that never had a source but seemed to appear out of no where. These were later succeeded by Xerox copies, but the result was the same, unsubstantiated rumors and un-sourced tales
With the advent of the internet, as shown by Snopes.com, the growth of Urban Legends has literally exploded in all directions. Now instead of spooky cautionary tales, you get paranoia, misunderstanding, and outright lies.
For a better understanding of Urban Legends, try the works of Jan Harold Brunvald, The Vanishing Hitchhiker, The Choking Doberman, The Mexican Pet and others. For a fun read try The Life Treasury of American Folklore, this one may be a little hard to find as it has been out of print forty years, but still a good read just for its historical value.

Speaking of Killer Clowns is there any possibility that this person could be the originator of said character.

Thomas Skelton courtesy Vance Pennington
Thomas Skelton is reputed to be the origin of the phrase ‘tom foolery’ and ‘tom fool’. He was a ‘fool’ or jester for Muncaster castle in the 1500s, and his ghost is said to haunt the castle. A painting of him hangs in one of the castle corridors.

Skelton was deemed to have an ‘evil’ side according to a legend which said that he sat under a chestnut tree by the castle door and directed travellers who asked for directions to London. But those he decided he didn't like, he sent to the marshlands and quicksands of the area instead of to the ford.

Another legend states that he was ordered by Sir Ferdinand Pennington, lord of the castle, to cut off the head of the local carpenter who was unwise enough to fall in love with Helwise, Sir Pennington's daughter.
(See also Muncaster Castle)
Doesn't this sound a bit like the original Killer Clown with 400+ years of layering on rumor, misinformation and misunderstanding.

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Matt Mc

7/10/2014 03:46:19 am

I watched KILLER LEGENDS last night and found it infuriating. It lives in this reality show based world jumping back between a documentary and reality show. While the subject matter is very interesting it is lost in its constant need to show its hosts talking and trying to figure out the answers and showing them working hard to do research. It follows a very similar formula and feel to GHOST ADVENTURES and DARK MINDS (which I will disclose that I have worked on the promo material for) and because of this approach making the filmmakers and researchers the star of the film and not the subjects being investigated it fails at what it attempts to do. inJosh Zeman's earlier documentary CROPSEY this approach worked because he grew up in the area and during some one the events in documentary it backfires here. The focus of the film seems to more on the great research of Josh Zeman and Rachel Mills instead of the events that are being investigated. There are many times in the film that instead of showing pictures or videos on screen for the viewer to see full screen bring them into the exploration instead we see Zeman and Mills holding or watching on a TV (just for the record converting a vhs to digital video is very easy and inexpensive and would of helped this film a lot, same with scanning crime scene photos) and debating or hypothesizing as to what the evidence leads to. Much like many of the cable reality based docs these conversations then lead to a possible hypothesis that a few moments later is presented as fact which serve only to make the onscreen talent look like master detectives. As for the exploration of comparing real life events to urban myths the cases they investigate are interesting and are worth exploring sadly the execution left me wishing for more depth and exploration into the physiological needs and compulsions that led to the myths being formed, sadly this only was touched upon or lost because of the style of presentation and annoying and overused minor key soundtrack that was continuously present.

Overall the subject matter was enough to keep me watching the whole time. It really does seem this was made as more of a TV pilot or movie with the hopes of a TV series down the line just like the first episode of GHOST ADVENTURES. If only Zeman had decided to stay behind the camera and let the subjects speak for themselves I think this could of been a very interesting film. The whole time I could not think of comparisons to James Elroy's film FEAST OF DEATH which could of served as a template for this film, Zeman however is not James Elroy and should of attempted to cross that fourth wall.

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Matt Mc

7/10/2014 03:58:53 am

I should add if I was still guest lecturing for film and editing classes I would use KILLER LEGENDS as a great example of why filmmaker should let the topics of documentaries dictate the presentation of the film. The more I think about it Zeman was really onto something interest and completely ruined it by injecting himself into the equation.

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EP

7/10/2014 05:42:00 am

This, pretty much.

Zach

7/11/2014 12:22:50 pm

I know this is off-topic, but Matt I'm a film/video production student and I wanted to know (if you don't mind) if I could email you and ask you questions about getting started in the field?

Zach feel free to email me, here is a gmail I just created mattmc4582gmail.com

I will say the best thing you can do is find an internship and start networking. Also practice, practice, practice, learn both Premiere and Final Cut, learn to replicate news, documentary and dramatic formats.

Also use after effects a lot not knowing after effects will prevent you from getting a job

Kal

7/10/2014 07:53:22 am

Mr, Colavito, Why do these people seem obsessed over your opinions on a blog? Clearly you are entitled to it. They don't lose any money over being talked about.

Clowns in the modern sense go back to the Prohibition in America and were a way for the traveling circus to mock drunken people. In other parts of the world, there have always been something like clowns also, the court jester and such.

Chaucer even included a character like a clown in his stories.

Shakespeare used the Loki like Puck in his Midsummer Night's Dream.

As for Killer Klowns from Outer Space, you really should review it! It's one of the most awesome horror cult classics of the late 20th century, and is clearly not based on anything real. They're alien clowns, as it says in the title! I suppose next these other critics are going to think the move Gremlins is based on an actual species of creature! Or better yet, the Audrey 2 talking plant from Little Shop of Horrors!

But urban legends can be fun. Not to be taken seriously. In the old days it was the nursery rhyme, so that woodland children didn't go running off into the woods and get eaten by a bear. Now that there are rational explanations for these mysteries, people still want to believe in it, and claim clowns or witches, or some other thing, like aliens, are doing the work of some malevolent devil.

The Joker is clearly a modern take on those older works about insane clowns and probably to some extent, Loki, and his modern interpretation in the newer Batman movies is one of more a maniacal dark prince of crime than a laughing hysterical psychopath. He is not based on anyone really, but on literary characters.

Whereas Batman is torn by the loss of his parents and the crime of the city, in that fictional universe, and it would drive anyone else mad, it makes him stronger and he fights for justice. The Joker is like his antithesis, his muse.

Kliller Klowns however have no moral qualms about all manner of twisted schlock. You should really see that film.

Thanks for your response. My post was not intended as an attack. As I said, your post was admirably detailed, it offered alternative explanations, and everyone should read it. I admire your blog but still have some issues with that post, and this follow-up.

To start out, I agree with you that older motifs contributed to all these legends. I never "feigned shock" at the idea that the hookman might have older antecedents. I just didn't find the one you chose very convincing, especially since it was chosen as part of your "literary flourish" leading to Harlequin (of which more soon).

So I grant that older motifs are there. But I believe it's quite possible that teller's knowledge of or anxieties about true crimes contributed to legends as well. Mine is very much a "both older folklore and true crime" approach, which was the point of including those ballads, which are all examples of poetically-told legends based on true crimes which incorporate older motifs.

I was responding primarily to to statements in your post. The first was "I don’t believe that most urban legends emerge from specific incidents from the recent past; if they did so, they wouldn’t be folklore and could easily have been verified by the original tellers of the stories."

I would agree with the first part of your statement. Most urban legends aren't born this way. But folklorists know that the second part is untrue. Stories that do emerge in this way are still folklore. And even though the stories originated in the recent past, it's usually quite impossible to find the "original tellers." (While you might find a purported first-hand account, most folklorists have encountered people who learned legends and re-framed them as firsthand accounts. So in practice verification from an original teller is almost impossible to achieve.) Thus, there is no reason these legends or any others can't be at least partly inspired by true crimes.

(In any case, you have now clarified that you were being unclear there, and didn't mean this the way it sounded, which I accept.)

The second was the "literary flourish," using Goethe's Erl-King to "prove" that the hookman is related to Pierrot. In this post you qualify the relationship you believe they have: "Erl-King and Pierrot, early parallels for our modern urban legends, share a mythic origin."

This is something I'd still dispute:

(1) The actions of the Erl-king of Goethe's poem are entirely invented by Goethe. There is no "genuine European folklore" about the Erl-King terrorizing young lovers in a hookman-like way, and in fact he does not do so in Goethe's poem either, since it features a father and son, not lovers. The terrorizing of young lovers is projected onto the Erl-King only because of Goethe's poem's resemblance to another poem (which does feature lovers).

The name Erl-King comes into German from a Danish ballad in which the figure is the king's daughter, and Erl-King himself is not a character. He does not terrorize lovers through his daughter, as you say...there's no evidence of his agency in the ballad. She also does not terrorize lovers, as Olof's sweetheart is at home waiting for him when he encounters her. This story doesn't even vaguely resemble the hookman. Meanwhile, there may have been other stories about the erl-king, but they are lost. Harlequin already existed for hundreds of years before Goethe wrote his poem, so even if "Harlequin" is based on some early medieval version of the "Erl-King," it is not based on anything resembling the hookman.

(2) It is disputed whether "Erl-King" and "Harlequin" are in fact etymologically related. Since the specific formulation "Erl-king" originated in a German translation of a Scandinavian ballad, it's
unclear whether the Germanic Herla (a figure certainly known to Herder, the German translator) or Scandinavian Eller (the figure in the original ballad) should be considered the root. These are probably etymologically distinct, "Eller" being cognate with "elf" and "Herla" with "earl." Jakob Grimm voted for "Eller," which would make him unrelated to Harlequin, but others believe Goethe had Herla in mind, because of the riding and hunting connotations. (A more recent theory is that "elle" is cognate with "albe," and "erl-king" thus identical with "alberich" of the Nibelungenlied, both meaning "white king" or "elf king.") So Harlequin clearly derives from Herla-King, as you say in the post, but it's not actually clear if or how this character is related to "Erl-King." So it's a firm maybe.

(3) Harlequin is not Pierrot, but a different character. Pierrot emerged later, and was probably borrowed from Moliere into the Commedia, long after Arlecchino was a stock character.

(4) Pierrot was not originally or essentially a killer clown. This plot device seems to have been given to Pierrot in the late 19th century.

So, there is a character with a name that MAY be related to "Harlequin," but there are no surviving stories about

So, there is a character with a name that MAY be related to "Harlequin," but there are no surviving stories about him. Years after his name was used for Harlequin, it was also used by Goethe. The character given this name by Goethe resembles other characters in other poems, who do something resembling what the hookman does. Harlequin appears in the same plays as Pierrot. Late in his development, Pierrot kills his lover or wife, becoming a "killer clown."

I think most folklorists wouldn't find this an example of common mythic origins for Killer Clowns and Hookman, or even Pierrot and Erl-King. But this is, of course, a "your mileage may vary" question.

Finally, as to Killer Clowns not being related to Gacy because the legend didn't emerge until the 90s, this isn't accurate. Killer Clown legends first came to the attention of local media in about ten cities in 1981. This was barely a year after Gacy's conviction and the coverage of his trial, which did feature pictures of him as "Pogo the Clown."

Anyway, thanks for the conversation. I apologize if my Huff blog sounded brusque; we have length guidelines there, and as you can see it takes a while to lay out these kinds of arguments! I certainly wish you all the best in you publishing endeavors!

Thank you for sharing your perspective, Stephen. I appreciate your information. I believe in my original post I had suggested that the Hook Man story was similar to the genre of riding poems with their supernatural menaces, with a wide range of victims. I think it's probably beyond question that there have always been stories of monsters that lurk in the woods and threaten those who venture beyond the boundaries of civilization.

I know Harlequin isn't Pierrot: the connection here isn't meant to be a direct derivation (like Blacula from Dracula) but rather a family tree of concepts that arose because of earlier concepts. Have you ever seen the classic series "Connections"? It's kind of like that.

I am not aware of the killer clown stories of 1981. I did a check of this, and I have a question for you: The "phantom clown" flap of 1981 seems very clearly to be a Gacy-derived panic. But is there any evidence that there is any continued folklore about killer clowns until the 1991 Homey the Clown abductions? Or are we looking at several independent media-driven panics?

I loved Connections! It's a little dangerous in folklore, though, because all stories are ultimately connected, and you can draw parallels between any two stories. One example of this is a parody of 19th-century folklore scholarship by R.F. Littledale, in which he proves that Max Muller (a prominent philologist and mythologist) is himself a sun god, using Muller's own methods. You can see it here:

http://www.elfinspell.com/Kottabos.html

To your question on Killer Clowns, there is evidence that the story never totally died between the outbreaks. Jan Brunvand in his book The Baby Train mentions a rash of supposed Killer Clown sightings in Phoenix in 1985, and a newsletter warning parents about them in 1986. There was an outbreak in Glasgow, Scotland, which seems to have spanned the late 80s and early 90s, which I get from firsthand recollections, so the dates may be inaccurate. I don't have other references here, but that cuts the time between outbreaks in half, and it begins to look more like a lull in which the legend just lost some steam, and less like two completely independent outbreaks. In pop culture too, Killer Clowns never really went away between the outbreak of the early 80s and that of the 90s. You had things like Rocket Raccoon, Pee-Wee's Big Adventure, Poltergeist, It, etc. Certainly the popularity of Homie might have contributed to a resurgence of the legend in the 1990s.

I love the piece by Littledale and know it well. In a more serious vein, Andrew Lang tried to prove that the Polynesians shared Greek myths, particularly that of Jason and the Argonauts.

I'm not sure, though, that we have enough evidence to know that there was a continuing killer clown urban legend vs. a series of disconnected panics after each new media wave of clown movies. I'm not sure how one would differentiate, though.

It's hard to differentiate, because (of course) oral folklore is ephemeral. But one way to keep looking would be to search full-text databases of local newspapers between 1982 and 1990. To be sure, I'd just search for "clowns." As you know, libraries have databases covering lots of papers at once, so you don't have to search individually. I bet you'd turn up more examples. But as you say, it's hard to be sure!

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